The morning I graduated
June 3, 2006. The end of high school, and the strange feeling of already knowing roughly where I was headed.
I graduated from Holt High School on the morning of June 3, 2006. I have a camera full of photos from that day, from late morning all the way into the evening, which is the only reason I can tell you the date at all.
Senior year had been mostly senioritis. The one thing that cut through it was a website. That spring my computer teacher had basically forced me into an FBLA web-design competition, I built a fake town to enter it, and somehow it won. By the time I was in the cap and gown, the grocery store I worked at had already offered me a summer internship in their IT department off the back of it.
So graduation didn’t feel like a finish line. It felt more like a door I’d already walked through without noticing. Most of my class was figuring out what came next. I had this quiet, slightly unfair sense that the next few years had already started, and that they’d started because of a hobby I’d been messing with since the fourth grade.
That afternoon my mom and dad threw a little get-together back home, and most of the people who matter most to me were there. My uncle Rodger and aunt Pat, my aunt Teresa and uncle Greg, my grandma, my aunt Cheryl and uncle Doug, and a whole crowd of my younger cousins: Matthew, Michelle, Megan, Scott, and Ellie. My brother, and of course my mom and dad. It was a simple backyard barbecue, a ton of food, and people pressing graduation money into my hand. I appreciated every bit of it, and I still do.
I wasn’t some standout. I was a pretty ordinary kid who liked computers a lot. But that’s the part I’d tell my younger self: the thing you do for fun, the thing nobody assigns you, is worth more than it looks.